Languages and Translations

This website was started as a Russian wiki, but due to high demand multilingual functionality was added.

This raised a couple of problems because it was highly unwanted to introduce extra complexity to the interface.

Current solution is based on a couple of principles:

• You should feel free to write in any language. Your contributions are welcome even if the language of your contribution is not the language of the rest of the page.
• Translations are not separated into separate pages. Doing it other way will cause translations to go out of date quickly.
• It should be easy to switch between translations without reloading the page (so that you can visually see the differences between translations).
• Structure of the page should not depend on the language.
• It should be possible to translate page incrementally.

Markup

Let’s say you have a page with these contents:

sh: 1: pygmentize: not found

This is a test.

== Test 1
Text text

== Test 2
Text text

This page has no translated parts and the sections are not marked. We can start by adding tags to places that we want to translate:

sh: 1: pygmentize: not found

#ENG
This is a test.

== Test 1
#ENG
Text text

== Test 2
Text text

Doing so will make ENG / EST / RUS buttons appear. Both EST and RUS will be marked red (no translations yet). Translated section only lasts till the next heading.

Let’s add some translations:

sh: 1: pygmentize: not found

#ENG
This is a test.

#RUS
Это проверка.

== Test 1
#ENG
Text text

#RUS
Текст текст

#EST
Tekst tekst

== Test 2
Text text

The order does not matter and some translations might be missing. That’s fine, somebody else will add missing translations later.

However, the headings are still not translated. Let’s try to fix that:

sh: 1: pygmentize: not found

#ENG
This is a test.

#RUS
Это проверка.

== Test 1 / Proov 1 / Проверка 1
#ENG
Text text

#RUS
Текст текст

#EST
Tekst tekst

== Test 2
Text text

In other words, the syntax is: English heading / Estonian heading / Russian heading. Right now you cannot provide just two, either give all three translations or just leave one universal heading.

Advanced contributors

These recommendations are for advanced contributors. As a regular user you should not worry about these things.

• If you speak several languages equally then please prefer English. Estonian, Russian, and international students have no problems reading English text. For that reason this website defaults to English in various places.
• Page names should be in English unless the page content is language-specific. For example, it is OK to have a page called “Список предметов на русском языке”
• If some section has to be translated but nobody is willing to write a translation then just put a language tag to this section. This will turn on the language buttons and missing translations will be shining red. Perhaps that will give some motivation to other contributors.
• You can close some section spontaneously (far before the heading) by using #LANG_END tag. This should not be required most of the time.